Immolation – the Heart of Priesthood

Fission and Fusion: Immolation – the Heart of Priesthood

[By Fr. Paul Francis]

Only a little more than a generation ago, the concept of sacrifice enjoyed an exalted dignity. It carried great coin in the public imagination and, consequently, its spirit in the American public was appealed to by authorities both religious and secular.

Parallel with the advent of artificial contraception and its enshrinement in the public culture through private interest, the courts, media and pharmaceutical advertising dollars, sacrifice has become a dirty word.

From an ecclesiastical perspective, a comparable eclipse of the sacrificial nature of the Divine Liturgy emanated from the very same period, namely that which shook the venerable Latin Rite of Catholic Mass.

The purpose here will be to offer a brief catechesis on priesthood, the office by which sacrifice is accomplished, with the explicit intention of demonstrating the congruence of its natural and supernatural manifestations. It has been prepared with an audience/readership of teens and young adults in mind.

PART I

My dear young people,

If I were to ask you, “What is a priest?” I am sure that you could give me many different descriptions of the things you have gleaned over the years concerning the priests who have served in your parishes. In this little talk, I would like to broaden your understanding of the word so that you may recognize better its operation, especially, in the vocation of marriage.

Let me begin by answering the question I just proposed. A priest is one who publicly offers sacrifice to God. Okay, there’s a start, but our next task, obviously, must be to make sure that we have a working definition of the word sacrifice.

As you might well already know, a sacrifice is a kind of gift. Little children making their First Holy Communion are quite capable of learning and being able to explain that a sacrifice is something difficult that you do for God to show that you love Him.

This is simple, but it is very profound. The biggest sacrifice ever made – Jesus’ willingness to tell us the Truth of salvation from His Father and to die for having told it to us, so that our death would not finish with our being headed for Hell – was something very difficult which Jesus did do for love of His Father in Heaven - and for us!

As you are old enough to understand more complicated things, I want to expose you to a word you may not have heard before and which is closely related to the meaning of sacrifice. The word is immolate.

Ordinarily, it means to destroy. I expect it to be a snap for you to remember because your back teeth which grind your food up so you can swallow it easily take their name from the same Latin root –molare.

Yes, sacrifice means that something valuable is being destroyed – but only for a good reason. If it is not for a good reason, the destruction is at least wasteful, and possibly, which would be worse, sinful. When people "sacrifice" their health, their families’ well-being, or other peoples’ safety and lives for reckless thrills or out of depraved indifference, that’s simply not sacrifice; these situations involve no love of anyone down here on earth, let alone of God.

For the moment, we are concerned with the good reasons, so let us take a closer look at immolation as God has established it. We have already made reference to the immolation that was Christ’s death. For years, you have been assisting at Holy Mass and I know that you have learned that at the Consecration bread and wine are turned into Jesus Himself. So you see, right there are two immolations. The bread is destroyed because it is not bread any more. The same is true for the wine.

What you may not know is that when the Chalice is consecrated, Jesus Himself is immolated. What does this mean? It means that even though He is risen from the dead and immortal, it is still possible - because He has willed and made it so - for Jesus to be executed. The first consecration makes Jesus, the Victim for our sins, present. But the second one immolates, or executes Him, because Jesus-Liquid has been separated from Jesus-Solid. This is a sacramental rendering of our Savior. In “nuke-speak,” a supernatural fission.

While this is a mystery and a miracle, it is still very important that you understand it as far as our human minds are capable. The priest is not being mean to Jesus when he executes Him. In fact, the priest only has this power over God Himself because God has given it to him in his ordination. Jesus Himself commanded that He be immolated by His apostles and their successors through the Mass. Why? Because Jesus loves us so much that He has made it possible for Him to continue being a Victim for us, making all the outpouring of His merits of His bloody immolation on Calvary present and available each time the Holy Eucharist is celebrated. (If you've seen Mel Gibson's movie, perhaps you've noticed how he tried to demonstrate this truth by the way he interspersed our Lord's being on the Cross with the action of the Last Supper.)

Once Jesus has been immolated, He is then offered in the Mass to the Father. I know that most of you learned even as small children to offer yourself with Him at that time. But you see, Jesus teaches us that only when a victim has been immolated can it then be offered to God. And in fact, we are immolated victims with Jesus at Mass. How?

We are executed – not by the Mass – but in three distinct moments:

1) In our Baptism, we ceased to be merely human beings: we became the children of God;

2) Life itself immolates us with a zillion and one crosses, heartaches and temptations.

3) Finally, we are immolated, as Jesus was on Good Friday, in the hour of our death, when our souls are rendered away from our bodies at God’s summons.

The Mass, however, is the great moment of bringing our immolated selves to be joined with Jesus’ Sacrifice, which takes place again and again and again, as long as there is a priest in the world to make It happen.

Now so far, we have been talking about supernatural priesthood, because the power that makes it possible is directly from God and is received through the Sacrament of Holy Orders. We also want to see how similar this is to the natural priesthood which is proper to marriage.

By God’s design, Holy Matrimony consecrates a man and woman to each other that they may accomplish the special immolations proper to family life. Because God has created him a man, a husband is a priest. Likewise, because God has created her a woman, a wife is a sanctuary. Just as at Holy Mass, even in marriage, the priest enters the sanctuary to offer gifts to God.

Now those of you who were paying close attention might raise an objection here: "Father, you said that a priest offers sacrifice publicly and a bridal chamber is not a public place!" While it's true that marital union is entirely private, recognition of the right to “sanctuary entrance” is public. That is the true meaning of weddings: they consecrate spouses to this natural priesthood and constitute public acknowledgment of its lawful exercise.

However, there is an aspect in which the parallels between the natural and supernatural offices differ: At Holy Mass, the Immolation of Jesus always happens. When a husband and wife come together, the immolation that comes about through the use of marriage, namely, the begetting and conceiving of children, sometimes happens. But when it does, its special character is this: God permits the gift from the husband and the gift of the wife to be destroyed – they cease to be merely separate fruits of the spouses' respective bodies. The biologist calls them gamete or haploid (half of the full set of 46 chromosomes) cells. If these cells join, they form a brand new body which God immediately consecrates with the gift of an immortal soul. By contrast with the supernatural one, the immolation here is one of fusion.

You can see the similarities: Jesus’ priesthood pours out the life of God into the world, while the priesthood of marriage – also involving God’s direct involvement – imbues new human life into the world. The first immolation is by fission - a tearing apart; the other is by fusion – a joining together which, strictly speaking, not even death can undo.

Of course, immolation in marriage is extended by the dying to self that makes it possible to have a prayerful, loving and peaceful home in which children can grow and flourish. Those of you who may have helped out in this regard, such as by walking a crying baby in the middle of the night, taking on extra chores to give your parents a rest, or making life a little happier in some way for your siblings, have already had a little foretaste of what it means to live out this more frequent experience of immolation. In fact, these kinds of experiences help bolster some of the virtues necessary for becoming good spouses and parents.

Having said this much, we would do well to look at the fact that there is widespread indifference regarding these holy matters. As we are all too sadly aware, the evidence that these beautiful truths are held in contempt by a great many persons mounts increasingly under the diabolical paradigm of contraception, divorce and abortion.

I would like you to notice two things about what I have just said. The first is that these issues are interrelated. That is the point of invoking a paradigm; it is a model which demonstrates connections among what might otherwise appear to be unrelated items. The second is that they come from the devil. Our Lord called him the prince of this world, the father of lies, a murderer from the beginning.

The reason he lies is that he hates God and therefore hates us. Hating us, he tries everything he can to destroy our lives both here on earth and especially, our hope of salvation. He hates the priesthood which rescues souls from the path to hell and he envies with an obscene envy the natural priesthood with which God chose to endow our human nature. (Imagine – we can picture ourselves hearing Satan’s thinking out loud - God sharing such a faculty with puny humans whose intelligence isn’t a fraction as powerful as that of Lucifer!)

Angels cannot beget their own kind. Yes, there is such a thing as satanic possession of human persons. In addition, it is even possible for the devil to play games with matter such that from time to time he will “fake” a body. For example, he has sometimes tried to keep saints from doing good things by appearing as an old friend whom the saint hasn’t seen in a long time to suggest a different plan of action than the saint was preparing to do. Despite these tactics, he cannot - no matter how many horror films Hollywood would produce to scare us into thinking otherwise - beget children. This privilege, this natural priesthood, God has given only to the human race.

So, in his hatred for God and of us, the devil has instigated his own kinds of immolation: Either he encourages us to divide what must not be divided, or he would have us unite what is sinful to unite. We will go into all that in our next talk. Before that, let’s take a short break and when we return, we can discuss any questions you may have concerning the natural and supernatural priesthoods God has created.


PART II

An important question came up during the break which would be very valuable to address for everyone’s benefit, so before returning to our consideration of the ways marriage as a priesthood can be stood on its head, let’s do just that.

The question was based on what I had said concerning sacrifices: that they have to be immolated before they can be offered. Now that you’re all hearing that claim a second time, you may be asking yourselves the same question that was presented during the break: Why is this so? Now to tell you the truth, my first reaction was that of being reminded what it was like to have my nieces and nephews ask all those Why questions: Why is the sky blue? Why is the grass green? Why do I have to go to bed?

Maybe you remember going through that phase when you were little. If not, I’m willing to bet your parents remember it vividly. Perhaps you were old enough to go through this with younger siblings or nieces and nephews yourselves. You can only go so far with talking about chlorophyll, sunlight and oxygen, before you get to that ultimate Why?, and at that point you can only say that it pleased to God chose to make it that way. Or, in the case of bedtime: “Because I said so, that’s why!”

Now, before you start thinking that I’m saying that asking why sacrifices must be immolated is tedious, I want to assure you that this is not the case. To be sure, the answer we will offer here has a “God made it that way” feature, but happily, it also has bearing on helping us understand better than ever God’s plan for speaking to us about His love for us. So here goes:

Before Adam and Eve fell, there was no human sin for which to make reparation and there was no alienation of man from God such that there was a need to pray against privation. Consequently, there was only the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. The only immolation that was in place was that very one we have been trying to understand tonight more profoundly: the one that begetting children was going to accomplish. The significance of that is that God was using marriage not only to create a human vocation, but also to prepare Man for coming to appreciate the deepest truth concerning God’s own Life, namely the Trinity. Married life giving rise to new life would be a faint, but nonetheless very real reflection of the love between the Father and the Son being itself a distinct Person, the Holy Spirit. Adam and Eve may not have been able to appreciate this has much as we do since our Lord came and made explicit what was still hidden in the Old Testament. However, guess who did know this, but didn’t have a share in it, and became bound and determined to destroy what had not been given to him?

All of us here have long known - not only from Scripture, but as well from our own interior struggle with self-control - about the devil’s sabotage, and that our first parents fell for it. So, even though our main consideration here so far has been “fusion immolation,” to complete our task we must keep within our scope the significance of “fission immolation” with respect to our sacrifices. Very simply, these latter draw us into the mystery of the Redemption. Every animal sacrifice, every liturgical law, every penance either demanded by God or freely embraced for love of Him has had this character: that it either prefigured, or now participates in the ongoing Sacrifice of the Son of God made Man, who as God could perform an act of infinite merit to atone for the sins of men, but Who as Man could do this on behalf on the human race.

Therefore, the “newer” purposes of worship, namely reparation and petition (supplication) obtain their character, so to speak, from their reference to the Cross of our Lord. To be sure, at certain moments, adoration and thanksgiving have their own cost (getting up for Mass when we’d just as soon stay in bed, to give just one example). But, the point is that though this had not been the case in Eden; it is now, and will be until the glory of the resurrection visited in our own persons has wiped away every tear.

I hope that explains why sacrifices have to been immolated before they are offered.

Moving on, we take up the sad business of our fallen nature relative to the natural priesthood. All of what follows carries two aspects: attacks on God’s own iconography of His Triune life (in other words, desecration of our persons created in His image and likeness) and attacks on the sacredness of His gift of natural priesthood (the capacity for marriage). It should never be forgotten that the immediate precursor of our Lord, His cousin St. John the Baptist, suffered martyrdom for his defense of marriage. Marriage, strictly speaking, is a chaste state, therefore what we are contending with in unchastity is whatever vilifies true marriage.

In the prologue of his gospel, that other St. John so close to our Lord during His life on earth, invokes a three-fold counter-distinction concerning what it means to become children of God. I have found in these three categories which he provides an outline for recognizing attacks on marriage. Following the Evangelist’s lead, let us see where our weaknesses lie, and the unholy immolations the devil prompts us to move upon.

… qui non ex sanguinibus neque ex voluntate carnis neque ex voluntate viri sed ex Deo nati sunt

… who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. Jn 1:13

BLOOD

While the transition to adulthood from childhood is meant to signify a flourishing of our human nature, it suffers, because of Original Sin, its own woundedness, a woundedness that is no small cause of difficulty for young people going through it. People joke to doomsday about the pains of acne, but these are but part of the fact that 10-13 years after birth, the pituitary sets a new series of hormonal events into action. Being hormones’ conveyor throughout our system, blood, in a certain sense, awakens us to the fact that our bodies have capacities of which we may not have had a hint beforehand, stirring a sad curiosity. Sad, because all too often, our consciousness is of what the new powers signify for us, rather than what they are before God and for Him. Consequently, behaviors which seek to obtain the often intense sensations that are connected with these new powers are the first diabolical immolation of them. They divorce our natural priesthood from the context of sanctuary, and therefore from the imagery of the Triune life of God. Our secular world insists that this is “natural,” but what they mean is that it is common experience. It is not natural at all that the body dominate the soul: this is the stamp of sin on our nature. And it doesn’t take much to recognize that the argument from the world is a phony one: gross comedians take a creepy delight in exposing people’s inclinations - either physical or emotional - to the sensations that attach to physical maturity. This is creepy because it frequently seeks to destroy a person’s public honor. Gee, what’s so funny about that?

WILL OF THE FLESH

St. John’s next category gives us an opportunity to consider two different kinds of attack on marital union: one is the normal use of the gift, but by persons who have not been consecrated to it. Whether this be fornication or adultery, is there ever any intention on the part either the man or the woman to offer God the immolation which result in new life? On the contrary. In fact, contraception only increases the frequency of this behavior and when that action to make sure God doesn’t show up with new life fails, murder often manages to enter the picture. Let’s not ever forget the big buck business butchering babies has become. So, union divorced from marriage - and remember, we’re talking true marriage here, not the serialized adultery that divorce and “remarriage” constitute - is one “will of the flesh” that destroys our dignity and affronts God’s majesty. Another, which, although psychologically different, has the same moral conclusion, the divorce of union from giving life, is the use of the body by persons who cannot marry each other, namely by persons of the same gender. The inclinations which lead to such actions represent complex wounds whose origin and healing we do not yet fully understand. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt about the morality of actions based on them: they put asunder the priesthood of the body from the service of giving life. In both cases, we are talking about a fusion which is sinful.

WILL OF MAN

In this category, we recognize everything about which Mary Shelley was either trying to warn us, or was bragging in a very peculiar way. Her novel Frankenstein is far from fiction as we too sadly know from the maniacal intentions of several state and even federal legislature initiatives in this first decade of the 21st century. The business of harvesting human gamete cells for the purpose of producing life for experimentation in a laboratory is the present day reality with ramifications beyond bizarre to consider. One of them is that there are hundreds of thousands of babies in the embryonic stage freeze-dried like so many coffee crystals in cryonic stations the world over. Apart from the murders of these children, which is a frequent outcome of such experimentation, this entire enterprise seeks to remove the transmission of life from the sacred environment of husband-wife union. This is marked by the voice of the devil saying to God, “I don’t need you to give me power to give life; I can do it myself!” As you most likely have noticed, this really doesn’t serve life; it reduces children to products - commodities which can be paid for or murdered upon a human whim. There’s another name for that: slavery.

CONCLUSIONS

What, then, is to be the defense against these evils? At root, the answer is to be found in one word which names a virtue, and that virtue is chastity. The world thinks that this word’s pronunciation can only be followed by the suffix “belt,” but we can do far better than that. Chastity is an infused gift of the Holy Spirit This means it is more than a human effort - it is a supernatural work. And just as we took our quandary in three considerations, let us do the same for this work of God.

Chastity is the virtue which protects the gift of marriage. It begins with the act of Faith which sees in marriage and family life, the glory of God and the first step in the provision of new saints for heaven. Chaste relations transmitting the gift of life in a Catholic home signify one aspect of the meaning of our Lord’s words, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.”

Moving in faith, chastity is constituted in the recognition that we have a faculty that must be sanctified by prayer. This is the lesson of the eighth chapter of the Book of Tobit in the Old Testament. Prayer is not only for obtaining strength in times of temptation, it likewise is called for to obtain God’s blessing on each act of marital union. Hollywood would have us believe that all union is about moving upon or surrendering to passion. Not only does such “entertainment” pander to account for many holy souls in the world, if not, in part, that their parents, by prayer, invoked God’s grace upon their very creation?

Third, chastity is about innocence. The dignity of marriage brings honor to parenthood: this is one manifestation of chaste innocence. But even if time has not revealed in our lives and brought into reality this vocation, all of us who have acquired the age of reason are privileged to engage nuptial relations with our supernatural Bridegroom. This isn’t simple poetry; it is a truth whose full measure can be seen only from heaven, and - barring a most extraordinary grace in this life - those in our midst who enjoy knowledge of this truth most don’t even have bodies! - namely, the angels of God.

However, even laboring under the veil of faith, we poor slobs, sinners, do get hints. Just think of a Mass you’ve attended since you left childhood where little ones were going up to the altar to receive their Savior for the first time. There we behold, void of the stains of selfishness, a marital union of the most chaste type. And if our hearts are not altogether made of stone, perhaps we - who have come to contend with the struggles embedded on our nature by the fall of our first parents - perhaps we find ourselves shedding a few tears in witnessing this. Why? Because in such moments, that innocence which is chastity is practically palpable to us - and, yes, we weep - for we are made homesick for the heaven for which we were made. To speak of chastity is to speak of innocence; to speak of innocence, is to speak of peace; and to speak of peace, is to speak of the readiness necessary to communicate the Gospel of Life to all who see our lives.

All of this in chastity’s regard is reflected in a portion of that beautiful prayer known as the Litany of the Holy Name of Jesus. Let us consider the six invocations that do this:

Jesus, Lover of Chastity, Lover of Us, God of Peace, Author of Life, Model of Virtues, Zealous for Souls, have mercy on us.

Jesus’ love of us is at once supernatural, marital and priestly. He has introduced a new Love by which He can come bodily to each under an Embrace which is utterly virginal and which bestows honor, innocence and peace. Jesus’ love elevates married love, making it a source not only of human life, but of sanctifying life. And sanctified life is both a magnet and a hunger for holiness in the lives of others. Is this not what these ever-so-brief prayers teach?

I do hope, dear young people, that our considerations have brought home to you a bit more clearly your understanding of priesthood. Also, that by understanding marriage in that light, that the furrows that constitute our battlefield with the Adversary (whose hatred, save for the love of God our Father, would be too terrible to consider) are more articulate in you. When next we gather, we will attempt to address more directly the warfare itself - which involves both defense and reparation.

To hold us over until then, let us take hold of some portion of our Inheritance, though, indeed our Father is very much alive. Not only has God made us His children, but He has given us a Mother, a Mother Whose Son is not only our Savior, but likewise, in a real sense, our Spouse. And chastity is a fruit of piety, one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit with Whom we were sealed at Baptism and Confirmation. To close tonight, let us gather these three dynamics into two little prayers which we might offer whenever we are making our thanksgiving after Holy Communion:


fpf

Mike,

I read this over carefully. This is an exact example of what I mean by teaching the Faith with specifics. If I could scream from a mountain top I would say... SPECIFICS. ( and be accurate) I will just stop right here before I get myself in trouble. This post is the way it used to be done and is returning again in this the Year of Faith. Right ?


JMJ,

George

George Brenner wrote: Mike,

I read this over carefully. This is an exact example of what I mean by teaching the Faith with specifics. If I could scream from a mountain top I would say... SPECIFICS. ( and be accurate) I will just stop right here before I get myself in trouble. This post is the way it used to be done and is returning again in this the Year of Faith. Right ?


JMJ,

George

Right, George, it is restoring balance and right order to perennial teachings and to disciplines, precisely what the "new evangelization" calls for. I like this because it is addressed to adolescents and young adults; I will tailor it (in bite size chunks) to my 8th grade class.

Thank you for saying and promoting the Novena for this worthy cause.

Catechism on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass

by Saint John Vianney

All Good Works together are not of equal value with the sacrifice of the Mass, because they are the works of men, and the holy Mass is the work of God. Martyrdom is nothing in comparison; it is the sacrifice that man makes of his life to God; the Mass is the sacrifice that God makes to man of His Body and of His Blood. Oh, how great is a priest! if he understood himself he would die. . . . God obeys him; he speaks two words, and Our Lord comes down from Heaven at his voice, and shuts Himself up in a little Host. God looks upon the altar. "That is My well-beloved Son, " He says, "in whom I am well-pleased. " He can refuse nothing to the merits of the offering of this Victim. If we had faith, we should see God hidden in the priest like a light behind a glass, like wine mingled with water.

After the Consecration, when I hold in my hands the most holy Body of Our Lord, and when I am in discouragement, seeing myself worthy of nothing but Hell, I say to myself, "Ah, if I could at least take Him with me! Hell would be sweet with Him; I could be content to remain suffering there for all eternity, if we were together. But then there would be no more Hell; the flames of love would extinguish those of justice." How beautiful it is. After the Consecration, the good God is there as He is in Heaven. If man well understood this mystery, he would die of love. God spares us because of our weakness. A priest once, after the Consecration, had some little doubt whether his few words could have made Our Lord descend upon the Altar; at the same moment he saw the Host all red, and the corporal tinged with blood.

If someone said to us, "At such an hour a dead person is to be raised to life," we should run very quickly to see it. But is not the Consecration, which changes bread and wine into the Body and Blood of God, a much greater miracle than to raise a dead person to life? We ought always to devote at least a quarter of an hour to preparing ourselves to hear Mass well; we ought to annihilate ourselves before God, after the example of His profound annihilation in the Sacrament of the Eucharist; and we should make our examination of conscience, for we must be in a state of grace to be able to assist properly at Mass. If we knew the value of the holy Sacrifice of the Mass, or rather if we had faith, we should be much more zealous to assist at it.

My children, you remember the story I have told you already of that holy priest who was praying for his friend; God had, it appears, made known to him that he was in Purgatory; it came into his mind that he could do nothing better than to offer the holy Sacrifice of the Mass for his soul. When he came to the moment of Consecration, he took the Host in his hands and said, "O Holy and Eternal Father, let us make an exchange. Thou hast the soul of my friend who is in Purgatory, and I have the Body of Thy Son, Who is in my hands; well, do Thou deliver my friend, and I offer Thee Thy Son, with all the merits of His Death and Passion." In fact, at the moment of the elevation, he saw the soul of his friend rising to Heaven, all radiant with glory. Well, my children, when we want to obtain anything from the good God, let us do the same; after Holy Communion, let us offer Him His well-beloved Son, with all the merits of His death and His Passion. He will not be able to refuse us anything.

Holy Sacrifice of the Mass
http://2786.datatrium.com/fcs/PDFFiles/v35n2sum2012.pdf

by Jude P. Dougherty
The Catholic University of America
Washington, DC

‘Earlier this year the French Conference of Catholic Bishops published a study of priestly formation in their country. As reported by Paix Liturgique, conservative seminaries do much better in attracting candidates than others. It is known that there has been an 85% drop in vocations since the close of Vatican II. At the end of the Council in 1966 there were 4,536 seminarians studying for the priesthood; in early 2012 there were only 710 candidates. It is clear from the Bishops’ study that the outlook at the parish level remains unfavorable.

It is also clear that the number attracted to the priesthood has much to do with the orientation of the bishop or religious community. Enrollment figures for Parisian seminarians peaked under the late Jean- Marie Cardinal Lustiger and sharply declined thereafter. Enrollments are increasing in dioceses governed by bishops in accord with Benedict XVI’s pontificate.

The French study cannot avoid the conclusion that increased enrollments are directly related to diocesan liturgical reform that has taken place in the spirit of the Holy Father’s directives. The situation is not the same in the United States, yet the liturgy at the parish level is often a cause of concern.

“The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass”! When did you last hear those words? Never? It sometimes seems that collectively we have lost the sense that the Mass is a sacrifice, an unbloody sacrifice to be sure, but a recreation of Christ’s death on the cross. The symbols of what transpires in many a parish are all askew. The sacrificial altar has been replaced by the communion table. We have gotten used to that and take it for granted in most parishes. Need we remind ourselves that in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the rites of ancient Greece and Rome, it was a male who offered sacrifice on behalf of the people. What then are all of those women doing, offering the communicant the Eucharist with see-through blouses and a décolletage that would have in times past had them thrown out of a high school dance? Often the priest himself, in lieu of a proper chasuble, seems to be wearing something that looks likes a bargain from a Wal-Mart sale, the multicolored stripes providing no visible sign that it is supposed to be a sacred garb. Something is wrong here.

What may be equally wrong is the use of the Mass as a backdrop for the parish musicians, no longer confined to a choir loft but performing in full view as if on a stage. Those strumming guitar players and that awful soprano, accompanied by a cocktail lounge piano do not add to or suggest the solemn character of the moment, nor do the ill clad Eucharistic ministers, who seem oblivious to what they are actually doing. We pray for vocations and yet use altar girls who, once forbidden, have become the norm. What boy wants to fight a girl for the opportunity to carry the cross or empty the cruets? A normal road to the priesthood was through youthful service at the altar. It is amazing that vocations still come, at least in some dioceses, when the priest is ordered around by the women who seem to be running the parish.

At risk is a concept of the awesome power of the priesthood itself, the power, through the words of consecration, to change bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ Himself. The nature of the priesthood itself is at issue. If through the symbols employed the real presence is implicitly denied, there is no need for the priest himself whose power to consecrate derives from an unbroken Apostolic succession. No wonder that polls show that many nominal Catholics have lost belief in the real presence. From the pulpit, when have you ever heard a sermon on any one of the Ten Commandments, the Sacraments, or the virtues? It takes a genius, and few have the talent to make sense of the disparate biblical readings, which lend themselves to storybook repetition, rather than to the preaching of doctrine. And then there are those petitions, often self-contradictory, often the reflection of someone’s political and social agenda, as if the petitions in the canon of the Mass were not enough.

Yet the people still come to Mass, perhaps out of habit or because it is the Catholic thing to do, but most likely because they believe in the Real Presence and are willing to endure liturgical practice that flies in the face of common sense. It is not clear who said it first, but it has been truly said, “The destruction of the old Mass was the greatest act of vandalism the human race has known.” ✠ (Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, Summer 2012)’